SOC107: Week 4 (FEB 5th) - “Reading Each Other”

SOC107 – Week 4 “Reading Each Other”
th
Tuesday, February 5 , 2103
1. Roles in Relation to Others
2. Reading Social Attributes
3. Presentation of Self
4. Assessing Symbolic Interactionism
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1. Roles in Relation to Others
- No role is an island [if we are all playing roles, what are the different roles that people are playing?
How are they playing it? You could be overlapping roles – a student, athlete, employee, etc. Each role is
in relation to another role. Example – a teacher is a teacher in relation to students; what is a teacher
with no student? ]
- roles in a context
- Ongoing negotiation
- how to play roles [Every choice we make is a part of how we are playing our role]
- Career in a role *there’s a trajectory that you take in a role depending on feedback you’ve had from
others at key moments (you don’t start from scratch, you have a history of “being a student” before
entering the room – there’s your whole career as a student leading up to this moment)+
- moral career [Issue on getting caught: law does not matter so much until you get caught,
because once you get caught your entire career changes – how does it affect your reputation, wealth,
employment future? It is only the people who get caught who have to pay a certain price for it. It is up
to contingency/luck.]
- Miscommunication [are we always honest? We cannot simply trust what they say or their physical
reaction to you such as smiling or eye contact, because it isn’t necessarily authentic+
2. Reading Social Attributes
- What we notice [what words do we use to describe people? Gender? Race? There are attributes that
we store for later]
- Master attributes [those that we weigh most heavily, and are heavily associated with power structures
in society – gender, racialization, social class, and are the first things to be stored in our mind]
- Strategies for handling *if we’re